The Untold Story of Germany's Energy Revolution and What Americans Can Learn From It

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A modern industrial economy, the biggest and most powerful in the European Union, is making a clean break from coal, oil and nuclear energy. It is on track to be running on 80% renewable energy by 2050. Some predict it could even reach 100% by then. The country is Germany, and what is happening there has a name: the Energiewende, or energy transformation.

Journalist Osha Gray Davidson will discuss what Germany did – and what the United States can learn from it – at this panel discussion and press conference at the National Press Club.

Other panelists include Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a legislator active in supporting clean energy development and action to reduce carbon emissions; Eric Roston, sustainability editor at Bloomberg and author of The Carbon Age; and Anya Schoolman, executive director of the Community Power Network. Arne Jungjohann, Director of the Environment and Global Dialogue Program of the Heinrich Boell Foundation will moderate.

Davidson spent three weeks in Germany this summer on assignment for InsideClimate News as part of the Heinrich Boell Foundation's Climate Media Fellowship, traveling to the sites of key projects and meeting with the people who helped push their country toward a goal so audacious that few have dared to follow.

What Davidson found, it turned out, was a very American story:

Of self-reliant individuals who almost 40 years ago began changing the way their towns got their energy. Of politicians who were eventually forced to bend to the will of the movement these people created. Of a country that has decided what its energy future should look like and is willing to make the sacrifices it will take to get there.

Davidson's account of his trip will appear in a series of six articles on InsideClimate News beginning November 13. All six articles, together with additional material, will be published simultaneously in collaboration with Amazon as a Kindle Single called Clean Break: The Story of Germany's Energy Transformation and What Americans Can Learn from It.

Panel Discussion at the National Press Club
529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20045
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
9-11 am
(Continental breakfast at 8:30)

Please RSVP to us-trainee1@us.boell.org or 202-462-7512.

Contact:
David Sassoon, Publisher
InsideClimate News
917-749-6115
david.sassoon@insideclimatenews.org

Rebecca Bertram, Program Director
Heinrich Boell Foundation
202-683-0731
Rebecca.Bertram@us.boell.org

SOURCE Heinrich Boell Foundation